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Slimebeast on 17 July 2010
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Killiana1a said:
Slimebeast said:

He is 100% right.

A game nowadays can give you even hundreds of hours of entertainment and yet we pay no more than $60 for it.

I got 100 hours with Dragon Age paying only $60 (actually I got it for free but... you understand the point).

Over 250 hours with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars for just $50.

Over 150 hours so far with Bad Company 2 for just $50.

Over 100 hours with Fallout 3.

And I've spent over 1500 hours on Oblivion paying only $90 (PC version and later the X360 version). Although that's an extreme case.

The value or bang for buck in games nowaydays can be amazing. No wonder publishers must change their payment model or else revenue will go down because we simply don't have time to play all these games.

 

I second all of this, but I beg to differ on the deeper issue.

Personally, I am quite familiar and intimate with pay to play as I paid $15/month from January 2007 until July 2009 to play the World of Warcraft. Coincidentally, I did not purchase any new PC games during that time.

Digging deeper, I can understand why publishers would want more pay to play games online because it presents a semi-permanent revenue source with lower marketing and development costs, but I firmly believe if it became the new business model as Pachter is advocating for, then we would see a huge dropoff in new releases and dozens of game developer studios shutter because the market would resemble monopolistic competition where you have the online FPS, the MMORPG, the sand box GTA style MMOG and on.

Pay to play is good for the publishers, but if it became the norm then the video game industry as we know it would cease to exist and evolve into an ugly leviathan where the content demanded is almost entirely top down by the developers via content patches World of Warcraft style because 3 to 6 good online games would demand well over 50% of the total video game monies.

Yes, less single player games that are long would be made if they couldn't charge more than $60 for them. But why wouldn't games like Uncharted, Bad Company 2, Crysis, GT5, Rage, Total War, Age of Empires, Red Dead Redemption, Fable III, Kane & Lynch 2, Left4Dead and Assassin's Creed be able to charge for online and still be competitive (I listed games that I happen to like)?

I mean, I don't want to play Call of Duty, Starcraft, Halo or World of Warcraft, I'd still only pay for the type of games that I like. So why exactly would we only get a few giants to monopolize the market?